BARCELONA: Lewis Hamilton played down his Mercedes team’s chances of challenging for the Formula One championship yesterday after rivals had talked them up.
Speaking to reporters on the wet and cold final day of the second pre-season test at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya, the 2008 world champion dampened any excessive optimism about his prospects.
“I think that people are talking us up at the moment,” said the Briton on a day of frequent interruptions and limited running due to the bad weather.
Hamilton said Red Bull’s triple world champion Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso had tipped Mercedes to compete for the title, something he disagreed with.
“I really don’t see that happening at the moment,” Hamilton added while pointing out that Mercedes, who won one race last season with Germany’s Nico Rosberg, were more than a second and sometimes two off the pace in 2012.
“We haven’t caught two seconds up and the other teams would have put another second on over the winter, so we’ve not gained three seconds. That’s just a fact,” he said.
“Hopefully by the end of the year, we’ll have gained three seconds - that’s our goal. But definitely not at the beginning.”
Hamilton won four races last year with McLaren, the team he has raced for since his debut in 2007, but has said before that it will be tough to triumph this season and his sights are more on 2014 when the engine rules change.
He said yesterday that he did not want to have any race wins “gifted” to the team because others had tripped up. “We want to do it through hard work,” he declared.
Despite the subdued comments, Mercedes have been doing plenty of laps in Barcelona and Rosberg was the fastest driver on the timesheets on Tuesday. Hamilton did a hefty 121 laps on Wednesday alone.
Meanwhile, Jenson Button said McLaren have yet to unlock the potential of their new Formula One car with the start of the season looming. The season starts in Australia on March 17. The 2009 world champion told Sky Sports television that there was plenty of work to be done at next week’s final test in Barcelona after the Briton had less track time than he had hoped for on Thursday.
“It’s been a very difficult few test days for me in terms of mileage,” he said.
“It’s been very tricky to understand where the car is: at times the car feels good, at other times it doesn’t. And a lot of that is basically understanding the car that we have and making sure it’s working as we expect it to be working.
“I really am looking forward to a good test next week in Barcelona because I don’t feel we’ve been able to do enough to really understand the car and where we are with the car,” Button added.
Button had similar problems last year, even within the space of a race weekend when the car would look very quick in practice and then be strangely off the pace in qualifying.
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